Saturday, January 05, 2008

MSBuild 2008 Console Output Formatting Changes

One thing I noticed today after upgrading my 2005 projects to 2008, is that the MSBuild console output has been reorganized a bit since the 2005 version.  This reorganization makes the output much easier to read.

From what I can tell, they've done the following:

  • The default verbosity output has been changed so that there's less tab space on each build line, and the tab space is maintained when a line wraps.  This makes the individual lines much easier to read and mentally organize.
  • The warnings have been organized by project, instead of all lumped together into one big blob of warnings.
  • Arguments passed to the compiler are no longer printed with the default verbosity

Below is a screenshot of MSBuild 2005, and directly below that is one of MSBuild 2008, so you can see the difference.

msbuild 2005

msbuild 2008 

Little things like this are important, and I appreciate someone over there taking the time to do it.  Thanks.

0 comments: